@hex@kolektiva.social2025-10-30 10:05:59
The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol
@metacurity@infosec.exchange2025-10-30 13:35:59
Don't get whipsawed by the overwhelming amount of cybersecurity news. Check out today's Metacurity for a concise rundown of the critical infosec developments you should know, including
--Former defense firm GM pleads guilty to selling cyber exploits to Russia,
--Nation-state hackers breached key US telecom services firm Ribbon Communications for nearly a year,
--US government agencies back bid to ban TP-Link routers,
--Hacktivists breached Canadian critical inf…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-08-22 04:45:48
Sources: Nvidia told suppliers like Amkor and Samsung to halt H20 chip production after China urged local tech firms to avoid H20 over alleged security concerns (Qianer Liu/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-ord…
@ErikJonker@mastodon.social2025-08-23 06:15:49
"The Scale of Russian Sabotage Operations Against Europe’s Critical Infrastructure" by IISS.
https://www.iiss.org/research-paper/2025/08/the-scale-of-russian--sabotage-operations--against-europes-critic…
@inthehands@hachyderm.io2025-09-20 17:20:58
The excellent @… (https://erinkissane.com) has written a lot about the idea of “governance” in tech: the human networks and processes that surround the things that we build. Erin has proposed — and I agree, though I long failed to see it! — that governance is the gaping hole in the way we build OSS, shared infra, and the whole technology commons.
3/
@Jeff@mastodon.opencloud.lu2025-08-21 21:51:06
@Mediagazer@mstdn.social2025-09-05 14:20:57
Nepal says it is blocking most major social media platforms, including Facebook, X, and YouTube, after the companies failed to register with the government (Binaj Gurubacharya/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/nepal-ban-social-media-plat…
@cdarwin@c.im2025-09-12 17:10:55
Trump said on Friday that he will send national guard troops to Memphis as part of his administration’s expanding military occupation of Democratic-run cities
“I think maybe I’ll be the first to say it right now: we’re going to Memphis,” said Trump while strumming a guitar.
The Memphis mayor, Paul Young, had signaled the intervention was coming.
“Earlier this week I was informed that the government and the president were considering deploying the national guard,”
he sa…
@gwire@mastodon.social2025-08-17 20:53:01
I wish that the flooding/drought situation could be communicated in a way similar to the UKHSA dashboard.
Defra-adjacent stuff tends to have either light information, or a level of detail that's too much for non-professionals.
I just want to see a map with regions coloured to show they're having problems, and maybe year-long time-series graphs that simply convey when a region has too much, or too little, water.
@inthehands@hachyderm.io2025-09-20 17:37:10
Somebody (maybe it was Erin? can’t remember) proposed that we should have a menu of governance structures just as we currently have a menu of OSS licenses, crafted with the same care and granted the same importance, so that somebody looking to share code can:
- communicate very clearly where they are on that continuum from “Here’s some cool code, maybe it’s useful” to “There is solid, sustainable human infra behind this code,” and
- get guidance and support so that, as their project grows, it moves smoothly along that continuum of governance.
7/